LinkedIn, no threat to advisor recruiters?

by Sophie Nicholls09 Jan 2014

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LinkedIn, no threat to advisor recruiters?

In-house, DIY recruiters may be plugging into networking sites like LinkedIn to track down their next financial advisor, but they don’t have the expertise to weed through the riffraff, argues one third-party financial services recruiter.

“Ultimately a company or bank has a choice whether they use a third-party recruiter or if they do it directly using LinkedIn,” says Steve White, managing director of the Michael Page Group, a financial services recruiter with offices in Toronto and Montreal. “But what we’ve found is it’s not as simple as that. They don’t have the right recruitment understanding and knowledge.”

The missing link between an in-house and third-party recruiter, White explains, is the ability to uncover who is actually looking for work (the main challenge when using LinkedIn), and who isn’t, speeding up the recruitment process. Third-party recruiters also come with their own database of people who they know are looking for work.

“The reality is LinkedIn has given us the organizational ability to contact people directly that previously you had to advertise or go through a recruiter to get to,” says White. “The commercial reality is that it can be very time consuming because you don’t know who is actively looking for work and who isn’t.” (Continued on Page 2)